MIT reports some of its researchers have developed a method to produce cheap NFC-based sensors that could tell if a box contains spoiled food - or explosives.

These inexpensive sensors could be widely deployed, making it easier to monitor public spaces or detect food spoilage in warehouses. Using this system, the researchers have demonstrated that they can detect gaseous ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, and cyclohexanone, among other gases.

“The beauty of these sensors is that they are really cheap. You put them up, they sit there, and then you come around and read them. There’s no wiring involved. There’s no power,” says Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at MIT. “You can get quite imaginative as to what you might want to do with a technology like this.”

MIT reports both it and the Lambda Chi Alpha national fraternity have banned the local chapter, Lambda Zeta, 99 Bay State Rd. in Boston, for five years for "conduct that does not support the fraternity’s priority of providing a healthy chapter environment for its members."

WBUR reports on the details of a survey of MIT students - which also found most never report the assaults. The Tech reports the school's president is "disturbed by the extent and nature of the problem."

The New Yorker talks to Harvard and MIT researchers trying to figure out how to battle Ebola by deciphering its genetic code, including Harvard biology professor Pardis Sabeti, who heads the "Ebola war room" at MIT's Broad Institute.

The next morning, Gire took a car to the M.I.T. campus, carrying a small box containing the tubes of droplets with the Ebola RNA. There, in a lab at the Broad Institute, he and a colleague named Sarah Winnicki, working alongside two other research teams, prepared the RNA to be decoded. The work took four days, and Gire and Winnicki hardly slept. By the end, they had combined all fourteen samples into a single, crystal-clear droplet of water solution. The drop contained about six trillion snippets of DNA. Each was a mirror image of a piece of RNA from the blood samples. Most of the snippets were human genetic code, but among them were about two hundred billion snippets of code from Ebola.

Mark looked up in MIT's Infinite Corridor this afternoon and immediately thought "broken neck" when he looked up and saw this guy on the other side of the railing. Musicians were in the corridor warming up for this weekend's Honk.